ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A new legislative audit is critical of how Maryland State Police (DSP) handles applications for Handgun Qualification Licenses (HQL) and firearm registrations.
The report accuses the agency of failing to conduct sufficient quality control (QC) reviews, and tracking the results improperly.
According to auditors, departmental policy requires reviews to be completed on a monthly basis. They're also supposed to be done by someone independent of the licensing process.
Neither rule was followed in this case, the report says.
"For example, DSP conducted QC reviews for 3.1 percent of the 372,277 firearm registration applications approved from May 2018 through May 2022, instead of 10 percent as required by DSP policy," wrote the auditors. "Of the firearm registration QC reviews performed, 15 percent identified errors, such as background check discrepancies or data entry errors."
Auditors later discovered the agency changed policy in December 2021, reducing the required number of reviews from 10 to one percent.
Police management told auditors the change was made in order to process a 140 percent increase in applications.
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This created a backlog and delay in reviews for an already short handed staff.
"Our test of QC reviews for 10 HQL applications disclosed that 7 of these reviews were performed from 63 to 227 days after processing," auditors wrote. "In addition, according to DSP records as of September 2022, the 11,554 QC reviews performed for firearm registrations during the period from May 2018 through May 2022 were conducted an average of 230 days (up to 514 days) after the application was processed."
Maryland State Police said they plan on being caught up by the end of the 2024 calendar year. The agency is also having their employees revert back to randomly reviewing 10 percent of applications from previous months.
Additionally the audit revealed State Police didn't have a comprehensive system to ensure proper documentation of critical firearm data.
New applications are normally submitted electronically through the State Police Licensing Portal, and then if approved, they're entered into a database called MAFSS.
"MAFSS disclosed approximately 600 instances in which the firearm serial numbers in the Licensing Portal and MAFSS were different," the audit disclosed. "Additionally, the data related to approximately 15,100 firearms, which were transferred to the applicant prior to June 2022, had not been entered into MAFSS as of September 2022."
While agreeing with the audit's overall findings, the agency said they're now current with firearm transfer data entered into MAFSS through December 2022.
Police also acknowledged the 600 errors noted by auditors, but said it "equates to a 0.16% error rate, and therefore meets the data entry industry standard error rate of 1% and is well below the established 4% acceptable error rate"
